


i'll know my name as it's called again

by mozartsfriend



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 21:13:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mozartsfriend/pseuds/mozartsfriend
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set during final chapter of Mockingjay. Katniss and Peeta return to District 12.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'll know my name as it's called again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [major_general](https://archiveofourown.org/users/major_general/gifts).



On the day Katniss is returned -- banished? committed? -- to District 12, Peeta seals himself in his room. He hasn’t had an episode in weeks and even so he’s getting much better at controlling them, but he hasn’t seen Katniss since they took her away for the trial, so he thought it better to just be safe for now. The anticipation is like a fire rising in his chest and he can’t be sure how his broken mind might respond to seeing her again.

He hears them arrive, of course, but doesn’t chance even a quick look out the window until much after they’ve gone. When he does, night has fallen and her house is dark.

He finds himself sitting out on the porch all night, waiting for a light that never comes.

**

Peeta keeps an eye on the house those first few days, but she doesn’t emerge. Greasy Sae comes and goes a few times each day, so he hails her down, offering up a fresh loaf of bread. He resists asking after Katniss, but then the old woman takes his hands and holds them silently in both of her own for a moment and he understands.

He paints to remember; however unreliable those memories may be. But when he tries putting Katniss’s gray eyes to paper, his hand begins to shake uncontrollably, sweat gathering on his temple. He throws his paintbrush across the room and watches it skitter across the floor, rolling to a stop.

Instead, he spends days trying to recreate the painting he had done before the judges at the Quarter Quell. The one of Rue lying dead, all covered in Katniss’s flowers.

When he’s finished it, he realizes it’s not Rue’s face that he’s painted, but Prim’s.

**

Peeta is lying awake in bed when he hears the front door creak open. Haymitch looking for more to drink, probably. Peeta has yet to check in with him since his arrival, which he’d feel more badly about if he actually thought Haymitch wanted to see him.

He doesn’t get up. Let the old man have what he can find, he figures.

The bedroom door opens, but something stops him from sitting up or asking who it is. Peeta sucks in a breath, feeling his body go rigid.

She moves across the room with the silent skills of a hunter, slipping wordlessly into the bed and settling warm along his side. Peeta feels her muscles relax against him as she falls asleep almost instantly. So quickly, in fact, that he wonders whether she’d been awake when walking over at all.

He waits for his body to react, for his mind to betray the moment, but nothing comes.

As her breath evens out, settling into a soft rhythm, Peeta feels memory of a rocking train -- real or not real? -- as they make their way to the next district.

Katniss is gone when he wakes.

**

The next afternoon, he’s working in the front room when he sees her. She’s standing out in front of the house, arms at her sides, body angled towards the woods like she’s looking for something, but doesn’t remember what.

He steps outside, hoping she’ll say something to him. Hoping for anything, really. She doesn’t move.

“Katniss?” he says quietly. Almost conversationally, despite the distance between them. He doesn’t dare approach her.

She turns her head to look at him then and his pulse starts to race. Perhaps a side effect of the disease in his mind, although this feels like something else entirely.

Katniss looks towards him, looking right through him. Like he isn’t even there.

He turns away from her and closes the door behind him, walks calmly into the next room, and then smashes his easel to pieces.

**

She comes to him again that night. And the night after that. Always the same, sneaking in after dark and leaving at dawn without a word.

During the days she’s a ghost, and at night she’s in his arms. Maybe not happy, exactly, but she’s there at least. He can feel that.

Dr. Aurelius instructs him not to go to the house, that his presence there might cause her distress in her current “condition,” he calls it.

She’s not taking care of herself, though. And each time he sees her she more resembles some kind of feral animal. Like that ugly cat she’d so hated. It gives him an idea.

Peeta starts to leave dishes of food on the porch, although he hasn’t a clue what might work to attract a rogue cat. But it’s at least something to distract from doing nothing.

He goes into the woods, just for an hour or so at first. Then for whole afternoons, and sometimes days. He’d never been brave like Katniss in his youth and so the woods are new and strange to him. This had been the place she’d loved so much, though, and perhaps he can find something that can help. If anything can.

At times he wonders darkly if she’d be pleased to find Gale waiting for her out there in their meeting place. If _he_ might be the one who could bring her back to life. Those thoughts don’t usually last long, but bubble up to the surface just long enough to test the limits of his self control.

The woods help him to remember some things, oddly. Maybe not memories he’d lost to the hijacking, but things from his childhood, and from hers. He remembers how people used to talk about her mother, about how she was after Katniss’s father died in the mine. How she’d become a shadow of the woman his father had once loved.

“Come back,” he whispers one night, unsure if she’s even awake to hear it. But he’d been lying there sleeplessly, holding her like every other night, and he’d suddenly had this overwhelming feeling that she was about to slip away. A feeling something like vertigo that he can’t quite explain, almost like he was about to drop her.

“I didn’t save her,” she says then, so quietly that he’s not sure if she really is awake. Her voice startles him all the same.

“You saved me.”

She opens her eyes. He can’t quite see her in the darkness, but he can feel her eyelashes brush against his collar.

“Did I?”

The next night, she doesn’t come back.

**

It takes ten full minutes of Peeta pounding on Haymitch’s front door for him to answer, all blinking and bleary-eyed.

“Whaddyou want?” he says when he does, wiping across his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Why aren’t you doing anything to help her??” Peeta demands, knowing full well how he sounds. But he’s got no one to yell at and blame at home, so Haymitch will have to do.

“Me?” Haymitch says, dissolving into a laugh. He’s drunk. “What about you? What have you been doing?”

“I haven’t been doing _interviews_ ,” Peeta shouts, disgusted with his former mentor. “What were you thinking??”

Haymitch just laughs. “What, you thought you two could just disappear to District 12 and be forgotten? Life doesn’t work that way, hate to break it to you.”

Peeta lunges at him, but Haymitch goes down entirely too easy, losing his balance and toppling over on the first shove. He’s on the ground and still laughing and Peeta slides down the wall to the floor, somewhat disappointed. It might’ve been nice to have an outlet for all of his anger. If only Haymitch could have complied and been useful for once.

“I was doing you a favor, kid. Both of you,” Haymitch says finally. “You think they wouldn’t have just shown up here if I didn’t talk to them? Just let them think you two are out here living out your golden years, it’s better for everyone that way. It’s better she gets left alone.”

“I just thought we could be finished now. Lying.”

Because really, having to convince the whole world that Katniss is in love with him has always only helped to make it all the more clear to him that she’s not.

Haymitch puts a hand on his shoulder, almost like he cares.

“You just need a drink, kid.”

**

The feeling of being drunk was enjoyable at first, until it wasn’t.

Peeta can feel his mind starting to rebel against him, but he’s powerless to stop it. He covers his ears with his hands, trying to block out all of the noise, but Haymitch’s laughing face is starting to look more and more like President Snow’s. He sees Katniss and everything goes black all at once.

“Peeta,” he hears through the fog. “Peeta, come back.”

When he opens his eyes, Katniss is there kneeling beside him.

Peeta reaches out to touch her cheek, but Haymitch grabs onto his arm to stop him, probably thinking he was going to try and strangle her like before.

He tries to say that he’s alright, but he’s not sure that the words ever leave his mouth before he passes out again.

**

He wakes up at Haymitch’s the next morning, but she’s gone. If she’d ever really been there in the first place.

Haymitch, grunting and half-asleep, tells him he'd been screaming her name, and then there she was.

That day in the woods, he stumbles on a few scraggly bushes of evening primrose. The next morning he returns to the same spot with a wheelbarrow and digs them up.

The ground in front of Katniss’s house is still hard from winter and he wonders whether the bushes will even take. Peeta doesn’t even hear her approaching until she’s right there, speaking to him in the broad daylight like it’s nothing.

“You’re back.”

He looks up, squinting at her in the sun. Did she mean that she’d seen him go into the woods this morning, and now he’s returned? No, it doesn’t look that way. The way she’s looking at him it’s as though she hasn’t seen him in months.

“Dr. Aurelius wouldn’t let me leave the Capitol until yesterday,” he lies. It comes to him so effortlessly, as if he’d known all along that this might happen. It stings a bit that their first real words in months would be untrue, and so he’s sure that his distaste is written all over his face.

“By the way, he said to tell you he can’t keep pretending he’s treating you forever. You have to pick up the phone.”

She suddenly looks nervous, swatting her dirty hair from her face. She seems to realize all at once how she must look, asking impatiently what he’s doing, and Peeta wishes he could say something that might offer some comfort.

“I went to the woods this morning and dug these up. For her. I thought we could plant them along the side of the house.”

It doesn’t have the desired effect, however, because Katniss looks about ready to tear his head off, and then cry, and then she runs back into the house.

Peeta watches the door slam shut, and then goes back to digging.

**

By the time she returns from the woods, riding on Thom’s cart because she’s clearly exhausted, he’s finished planting the bushes. He waits until Thom leaves before going over, stepping cautiously through the front door when Katniss doesn’t respond to his knocking.

“Katniss?” he asks while climbing the stairs. The only response he gets is the hissing of that hideous cat. Guess he finally found his way back after all.

She’s sitting in an empty bathtub, arms wrapped around her knees, when he finds her.

“I look awful,” she says when he hesitates at the door. “My hair.”

“I could...help,” is all he can manage to say, and although she doesn’t say yes, he takes it as one anyway.

He warms the water on the stove downstairs, it’s suddenly unfortunate they’re without those former Capitol luxuries like running showers and baths.

When he returns, she’s standing next to the bath, waiting for him. He fills the tub with the hot water and when she raises her arms above her head he helps her to slip off her shirt. He tries his best not to look at her body in the way he might like to under a different set of circumstances.

He helps her into the bath, running a soapy cloth over her back and helping her to work the grime out of her hair. She starts to look like herself again, however superficially. It’s something, at least.

“I got a call today,” she says as he's washing her neck. “I thought it was Dr. Aurelius, so I answered.”

“They wanted an interview,” he says, understanding. He’s gotten several of those calls since he’s been back and always hung up the phone immediately. “We’re still big news, you and I. Though public opinion seems rather split on whether we’re heroes or traitors to the cause.”

Katniss laughs, and it’s almost like he’s dreamed it. “So long as they don’t come here, I don’t care what anyone thinks of us.”

“I’ll chase them out if they try.”

**

She starts to come back to him -- slowly, but it’s enough. He never mentions those nights she spent with him, knowing too well the regret of being unable to remember.

She kisses him one night, and that fire she’d once reserved only for the Games, for the rebellion, was suddenly meant only for him.

Her fingers trace along the skin of his abdomen, up his ribcage. She breathes in his name as he exhales hers, his lips pressing along the insides of her wrists, her breasts, her thighs.

“Peeta, I--” she gasps, unable to continue as his tongue moves against her. He understands, though.

“You love me. Real or not real?” he asks her afterward, pressing his lips gently to her cheek.

She’s quiet for a moment, long enough to make him question his own foolishness.

“Real,” she says finally, and really, it’s the answer he’s always somehow known.

**


End file.
